Vodacom’s parent company Vodafone has been among the leaders in the development of the standard and will roll out commercial services across all its networks until 2020.

The global shipments of NB-IoT devices will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 41.8 percent from 106.9 million units in 2018 to reach 613.2 million units in 2023, according to a new research report from IoT analyst firm Berg Insight.

The analyst firm said strong growth is fuelled by fast-growing demand in China where NB-IoT is set to replace 2G in mass-market applications.

“China is driving a major paradigm shift in the global cellular IoT industry”, says Tobias Ryberg, senior analyst and author of the report.

“The country has embarked on one of the world’s largest digital infrastructure projects that will result in billions of new connected devices in the coming five years. NB-IoT has been designated as the country’s preferred LPWA technology and plays a key role in the national policies.”

The transition from 2G to 4G is a global trend, accelerated by NB-IoT.

In Europe, the leading mobile operators are making good progress towards ubiquitous coverage for NB-IoT.

Vodacom’s parent company Vodafone has been among the leaders in the development of the standard and will roll out commercial services across all its networks until 2020.

NURNBERG, GERMANY – OCT 3, 2015: Logo of Vodafone – Vodafone is a British multinational telecommunications company and It is the one of the world’s largest mobile telecommunications company. (Photo credit: www.shutterstock.com)

At the end of 2017, the operator had live NB-IoT services in Italy, Spain, Ireland and the Netherlands.

Australia, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey and the UAE are other examples of countries where rollouts are already underway.

LTE-M is another technology that will play a key role in the market transformation.

Berg Insight predicts that adoption will accelerate during 2018/2019 and scale to massive volumes beyond 2020. Berg Insight forecasts that yearly shipments of LTE-M devices will reach 185.3 million units in 2023.